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Cleaning Up The Linux Graphics Driver Stack

02-07-2010, 08:00 AM

Phoronix: Cleaning Up The Linux Graphics Driver Stack

Yesterday Luc Verhaegen gave a talk at FOSDEM on reverse engineering a motherboard BIOS, but today we finally have X@FOSDEM for the last time. Luc has just begun his talk on unifying and simplifying the free software desktop's graphics driver stack. Here are his slides and we will be back with more updates and videos on Phoronix as the presentation progresses.

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I am deeply impressed by the "unichrome" slide. I think it's urgent to handle this issue. The 3 parts had never been fixed together seamlessly in every distributions. Nearly every update of one component causes more or less regressions, especially for a cutting-edge distro user like me.(Archlinux)

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I am deeply impressed by the "unichrome" slide. I think it's urgent to handle this issue. The 3 parts had never been fixed together seamlessly in every distributions. Nearly every update of one component causes more or less regressions, especially for a cutting-edge distro user like me.(Archlinux)

Nothing is likely to change... It was basically discounted by other developers as either something tried and didn't work, don't care it's a problem, Unichrome is totally different from -intel, all we care about are features and performance, etc.

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Luc is a talented coder for hardware drivers, but unfortunately his work doesn't get into distro user's hands often because of his penchant to fork projects. The forks end up abandoned by everyone else (unichrome and radeonhd come to mind), probably because of his inflexible attitude (it's his way or the highway). He'd make a much bigger impact if he learned to coordinate with other FOSS programmers (we're all on the same team!) and accept some compromises.

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Nothing is likely to change... It was basically discounted by other developers as either something tried and didn't work, don't care it's a problem, Unichrome is totally different from -intel, all we care about are features and performance, etc.

Unichrome doesn't have a kernel drm or mesa driver component.

Shipping drivers and expecting your users to enable the functionality they want with an xorg.conf is also fail, (radeonhd might have DRI enabled now).

This talk held nothing of interest really. *yawn*.

Intel ship releases every quarter with the recommended components are tested together, this stuff doesn't need to be in one tree, shipping out of tree kernel modules is also fail.